JACK'd Features

Lance Armstrong was one of the world’s most revered athletes, until he revealed his big secret to the world: he had been doping up.

A new book, Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever, written by Wall Street Journal reporters Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell, gives an inside account of Armstrong’s life and career. The biggest news from the book is that singer, and then-girlfriend, Sheryl Crow witnessed Armstrong receiving an illegal blood transfusion.

“Rather than try to hide the transfusion from her, Armstrong was completely open about it,” it reads. “He trusted that Crow would have no desire to tell the press or anyone else about the team’s doping program. He explained that it was simply part of the sport — that all cyclists were doing the same thing.”

While Deadspinreports Crow was contacted by investigators as a grand jury considered a federal indictment against Armstrong, the New York Daily News claims that she was in fact interviewed as part of the doping investigation and stayed with Armstrong and teammates in Girona, Spain, which was a “distribution point for performance-enhancing drugs and a place to store bags of blood before reinfusing it at big races.”

Crow was originally subpoenaed to testify, but the new book reports that she was given a written agreement protecting her from prosecution if she revealed everything she knew about Armstrong’s situation. While she reportedly told investigators what she knew about him, the grand jury eventually dropped the case against Armstrong.

Over 100 interviews with former teammates, federal investigators, among others, were conducted for Wheelmen to shed some light on Armstrong. You can read an excerpt of the book here. Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever will be released on October 15.